A sense of fairness and tolerance essential for citizenship, professor says

Scarlett Steele, 3, of Huntsville, Ala., celebrates Independence Day a day early with the children from Mayfair Child Development Center on Thursday, July 3, 2014 in Huntsville, Ala. (AP Photo/AL.com, Eric Schultz)

Teaching your children to be good citizens can be as easy as demonstrating how a good citizen behaves, according to local experts.

Paula Finney, principal of Roscoe Wilson Elementary School, recommends parents exhibit the behavior they want their children to follow. By modeling the characteristics of a good citizen and teaching your children to be lifelong learners, especially about the community, you can teach them to take of themselves and others, she said.

“Once they know they are capable of some of those characteristics, they can begin to understand and experience what it means to care about something bigger than oneself,” Finney added.

A sense of fairness and tolerance is also essential for citizenship, said Walter Schaller, a politcal philsophy professor at Texas Tech. “Here’s the big picture in the political community of a state of society: It’s often not in each person’s interest to pay taxes and let someone else do it,” he says. “A sense of fairness would be your willingness to do your fair share along with everyone else.”

Tolerance is also important because of the diversity of the American population.

“We’re going to have different people; we’re not all going to be Buddhist or Muslim or Hindu and we’re going to have those differences, and some of those differences matter to some people,” he added. “We have to learn to tolerate those with signficant differences from us.”

Edward Perkins, a history teacher at Lubbock High School, stressed the importance of active participation in the community.

“If you live in a country but you never vote or exercise your civic duties — like being involved in government affairs — I don’t think you’re much of a citizen,” he said.

Active participation includes voting, faithfully executing the laws, participating in jury duty and discussing the issues of the day, Perkins said.

“By exercising that responsibility, you feel much more involved in the process and you are, to some degree, involved in the outcome. But if you don’t participate, you can’t possibly learn from anything.”

By actively participating in the community, you can encourage your children to do the same.

“If you have a child who sees parents who are invovled, that child is much more likely to be involved,” Perkins added.

Other ways to develop your children’s citizenship include educating them about the history of the United States.

Thomas Reynolds, an International Baccalaureate history teacher at Lubbock High School, said he tries to teach his students about citizenship by holding discussions about current events and reframing historical lessons about citizenship into obligations students might have toward their friends, teammates, family and school community.

“When we talk about the rights and privileges associated with citizenship, especially in the context of Reconstruction through to Civil Rights in the 1960s, I try to get my students to think about what it would mean for them if they were excluded from being recognized as the same as their peers,” he said. “Doing so, I hope, helps them get a better grip on why minority rights should matter to them even if they are in the majority, something that they might take for granted and not even understand why it is such an issue for some people.”

Schaller noted the importance of schools in educating children about citizenship.

“The public schools,” he said, “despite all of their failings, have an important function when you take kids from all over the world and you’re trying to turn them into American citizens.”

Reynolds agreed, “At base, I think learning history should help students understand those around them who might be different from themselves and why the world works, or doesn’t work, the way it does.”

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And the experts here parroting the same buzzwords and rubbish. Diversity, tolerance, yadda, yadda. It's funny how none of them mentioned the vital first step to ensure that a child grows into a well-rounded, responsible, morally decent citizen: being raised in a two-parent family.

Do you remember in those old Warner Brother and MGM cartoons where the antagonist character sets a trap of sorts for the protagonist Bugs/Tweety/Droopy, but Bugs/Tweety/Droopy is quite aware of said trap and signals to the audience of this with a big grin or a wink before they pretend to walk into it?

That's how I feel right now. Also note the grin on my face.

To answer your question, Obviousman, there are different ones that I wouldn't approve of. Particularly multiples-of-two parent families, and families with parents that use particularly large values of two.

And this is exactly what I anticipated you were building up to with that semi-loaded question up there. That's why I gave you a ridiculous non-answer. And, within this thread of comments, you have no information whatsoever which would ever suggest I would disapprove of same-sex couples with adopted children.

And despite this, you're still attempting to push that fallacious line of reasoning. Please tell me that you were a paper-pusher and not an infantry officer during your time in.

Remember, there are plenty of "traditional" households where the children are physically or mentally abused or both.

Yes, I'm well aware of this. What does this have to do with anything? The fact of the matter is, children from single-parent homes are more likely be screwups and criminals in life. Citation: Juvenile Crime: Opposing Viewpoints, P 62-66, 1997, A E Sadler, ed. National Criminal Justice Service: NCJ-167319

Summary: If you try to generalize judgements on this topic based on factors X, Y, and Z, you will always find exceptions...

Who's generalizing? I'm bringing facts to the table here. I can bring more if you'd like, and I will gleefully cite their sources.

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." Jonathan Swift "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." Groucho Marx

positive impact on developing humans, but it is only one factor of many. SocioEconomic Status is probably the most salient factor, due to its impacts on so many other factors, like parental educational level, race, family functionality, to name a few.

Unfortunately, breaking the cycle of poverty, ignorance, crime, and other negative developmental outcomes is very complicated, and Texas is not known for putting much time, effort, or money into programs which have shown to be effectual in dealing with those factors.

As far as two parent households go, same-sex parents seem to do as well, or better than other-sex parents as a group, with regard to positive developmental outcomes.